Honor MagicBook Art 14

The Asus Zenbook S13 OLED has been a marvelous travel-friendly laptop that has accompanied me on several trips out of the country now. It has great build, the now very mandatory in all my laptops OLED display, a compact form factor, and decent-enough processing chops. In short, almost perfect – except for two bits: the absence of higher refresh in the display – which I’d been able to live with – but also serious thermal issues, which has been a real challenge to manage! The S13 heats up noticeably when I’m doing anything other than the simplest tasks, and it ejects heat from the left air vent, and where my left hand is when I’m typing away.

The challenge though is that it’s not easy trying to find a substitute travel laptop, since you can only have two of the three desirable requirements when it comes to laptops: price, performance, or weight. Oddly, Asus has not been putting up newer models of their Zenbook S13 line-up, and their most recent models are still using processors from a few generations ago.

In any case, here’s what I look for in travel laptops again:

An ultra low voltage processor

OLED display, and preferably one that supports higher refresh rates

End-user replaceable SSD

1kg weight or so

And of these requirements, Acer has a small number of laptops that can meet these requirements above, but cost well in excess of SGD2K. MSI has a compact laptop but it doesn’t come with an OLED option. And there’s also the Microsoft Surface Pros, with the Surface Pro 11th edition OLED ticking all those boxes but costing over SGD2.2K. Moreover, it uses an ARM processor – which while I could figure out workarounds, wasn’t my preferred processing platform. And finally, there is the Asus Zenbook A14 with a compact chassis, OLED display, and wonderfully light – but also using an ARM processor.

I eventually discovered the Honor MagicBook Art 14 in my search. The Honor MagicBook Pro 14 I picked up several months ago has performed amazingly well, and I was gaining confidence in Honor’s products. The Art 14 has been lauded by some tech pundits as the best ultraportable that you (probably) can’t buy, since it’s not available in most parts of the world outside China. The Art 14 certainly ticked all the boxes I had: not only did it come with a higher than normal resolution 2080p OLED display, it is touchscreen-enabled and also supports 120Hz refresh. The Art 14 is just a shade over 1kg heavy – 1.031kg specifically – uses magnesium alloy for its external chassis, and has both USB-A and USB-C ports. And if you’d ever been worried about your laptop camera getting hijacked by hackers, the Art 14 gives you the peace of mind that no other laptop can: the Art 14 employs a detachable camera module that you can stow away in a side compartment when not in use. The only flaw I could see from the specifications is the laptop size: despite its 1kg weight, the laptop uses a relatively large 14.6″ display. So, while the screen to body ratio is a fantastic 91% on account of its thin display bezels all round and the absence of a webcam notch, the laptop is unavoidably much larger in size than the standard 13″ laptop.

As for the laptop availability, like the Honor MagicBook Pro 14, I had to rely on Chinese resellers on Shopee to bring the laptop in. And boy, it’s always a bit of a nerve-wrecking experience, as you don’t know for sure what you’re getting until it actually arrives! There is at least half a dozen resellers on Shopee offering more/less the same line of Chinese laptops and bringing them into Singapore from Hong Kong. The laptop normally retails for around SGD1.7K to SGD1.8K, but I found one offer when bundled with seasonal store and Shopee discounts managed to bring the cost of the item down to under SGD1.6K.

My initial comments of the laptop after a week of use: I’m very satisfied with it. The size and girth aside, the laptop is indeed featherlight but yet still offering confidence in its strong build. The Art 14 is responsive, OLED display is lovely, speakers put out reasonably full-bodied audio, and the detachable camera works as featured. This will be the laptop that’d be in my carry-on luggage for the next trips I have coming up in the next few months!